Global warming has already increased the risk of major disruptions to Pacific rainfall and will continue to do so over coming decades, even if global warming during the 21st century is restricted to 2℃.

While short-term weather patterns and the El Niño contributed to climate extremes in October 2015, climate records would have been substantially less likely to fall without human-induced climate change.

Global fossil fuel emissions have stalled over the past three years, but we need to accelerate deployment of existing technologies and develop new technologies and behaviours if we’re to keep global warming below 2℃.

This year’s Global Carbon Budget found that, for the third year in a row, global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry have barely grown, while the global economy has continued to grow strongly.

Climate projections provide important information to help make decisions about the future, but projecting what the climate is likely to look like in 10 or 100 years is a little different to predicting tomorrow’s weather.

When we think of global warming we often think of the impacts of droughts and extreme weather, so research showing that the world has been getting greener over the past 30 years is perhaps not what you’d expect.

We can certainly say that sea levels are rising at an accelerating rate, after several millennia of relative stability. The question is how far and how fast they will go, compared with Earth’s previous history of major sea-level changes?